Christina Hoff Sommers: Difference between revisions

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Christina Hoff Sommers (/ˈsʌmərz/; born 1950) is an American author and former philosophy professor known for her opposition to late 20th-century feminism in contemporary American culture. Her most widely discussed books are Who Stole Feminism?^[1] and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. Although some critics refer to her as anti-feminist,^[2][3] Sommers labels herself an "equity feminist" who faults contemporary feminism for "its irrational hostility to men, its recklessness with facts and statistics and its inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different."^[4]

Career

Sommers earned a BA at New York University in 1971, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a PhD in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979.^[5]

A former philosophy professor in Ethics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. She is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the nonpartisan^[6] Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.^[7] Sommers has appeared on numerous television programs including Nightline, 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, and has lectured and taken part in debates on more than 100 college campuses^[4] and served on the national advisory board of the Independent Women's Forum.^[8]

Ideas and views

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes "equity feminist views as libertarian and socially conservative.^[9] Sommers coined the terms "equity feminism" and "gender feminism" to differentiate what she sees as acceptable and non-acceptable forms of feminism. She describes equity feminism as the struggle based upon "Enlightenment principles of individual justice"^[10] for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the early feminists, as in the first wave of the women's movement. She characterizes "gender feminism" as having "transcended the liberalism" of early feminists so that instead of focusing on rights for all, gender feminists view society through the "sex/gender prism" and focus on recruiting women to join the "struggle against patriarchy."^[11] Reason magazine reviewed Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and characterized gender feminism as the action of accenting the differences of genders in order to create what Sommers believes is privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or the advancement of personal agendas.^[12][13]

Sommers is a longtime critic of Women's Studies departments, and of university curricula in general. In an interview with freelance journalist Scott London, Sommers said, "The perspective now, from my point of view, is that the better things get for women, the angrier the women's studies professors seem to be, the more depressed Gloria Steinem seems to get."^[14] According to The Nation, Hoff Sommers explains to her students that 'statistically challenged' feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda." These professors, she claims, are peddling a skewed and incendiary message: 'Women are from Venus, men are from Hell'.^[15]

Sommers has also written about Title IX and the shortage of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. She opposes recent efforts to apply Title IX to the sciences^[16] because, she says, "Science is not a sport. In science, men and women play on the same teams...There are many brilliant women in the top ranks of every field of science and technology, and no one doubts their ability to compete on equal terms."^[17] Title IX programs in the sciences could stigmatize women and cheapen their hard-earned achievements. Sommers adds that personal preferences, not sexist discrimination, plays a role in women's career choices.^[18] Not only do women favor fields like biology, psychology, and veterinary medicine over physics and mathematics, but they also seek out more family-friendly careers. Sommers writes that "the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career."^[17]

Sommers has written that "conservative scholars have effectively been marginalized, silenced, and rendered invisible on most campuses."^[19]

Who Stole Feminism

Sommers writes in Who Stole Feminism that an often-mentioned March of Dimes study which says that "domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects," does not exist. Scholar Nancy K.D. Lemon, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, rebutted this claim, noting that the study "Battering During Pregnancy: Intervention Strategies," by Anne Stewart Helton and Frances Gobble Snodgrass, funded by a grant by March of Dimes, appears in the September 1987 issue of the journal Birth.^[20] Sommers writes that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban legend, and that such statements about domestic violence helped shape the Violence Against Women Act, which allocates $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for ending domestic violence. Sommers writes that feminists assert that approximately 150,000 women die each year from anorexia—an apparent distortion of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 females have some degree of anorexia.^[21][22] Melanie Kirkpatrick, writing in The Wall Street Journal, praised the book for its "lack of a political agenda. … Ms. Sommers simply lines up her facts and shoots one bullseye after another."^[23] However, an article circulated by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watch group, panned Sommers's book as being "filled with the same kind of errors, unsubstantiated charges and citations of 'advocacy research' that she claims to find in the work of the feminists she takes to task ..."^[21]

The War Against Boys

Sommers wrote in The Atlantic, about her own book The War Against Boys, that misguided school curriculum is a likely cause for many problems in education, including falling reading scores of lower-school boys. Sommers writes that there is an achievement gap between boys and girls in school, and that girls in some areas are achieving more than boys. She writes, "Growing evidence that the scales are tipped not against girls but against boys is beginning to inspire a quiet revisionism. Some educators will admit that boys are on the wrong side of the gender gap."^[24] Writing for The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote of the book: "There is a cry in the wilderness quality to her book, a sense that certain simple truths have been lost sight of in the smoky quarrelsomeness of American life. It is hard not to credit her with a moral urgency that comes both from the head and from the heart."^[25]

Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University, has compared Sommers' book with the separate but complementary work of psychologist William Pollack, author of Real Boys' Voices and Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and with the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan.^[26] Richard Bernstein, a New York Times columnist, praised the book, writing, "The burden of [this] thoughtful, provocative book is that it is American boys who are in trouble, not girls. Ms. Sommers...makes these arguments persuasively and unflinchingly, and with plenty of data to support them."^[25]

Anthony Rotundo of the Washington Post, in reviewing Sommers' The War Against Boys, stated: "In the end, Sommers ... does not show that there is a 'war against boys.' All she can show is that feminists are attacking her 'boys-will-be-boys' concept of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion ... Sommers's title, then, is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading... a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic."^[27]

Books by Sommers

• 1986, Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics. ISBN 0-15-577110-8.
• 1995, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women ISBN 978-0-684-80156-8.
• 2000, The War Against Boys. ISBN 0-684-84956-9.
• 2003 (with Frederic Sommers), Vice & Virtue in Everyday life. ISBN 978-0-534-60534-6.
• 2006 (with Sally Satel, M.D.), One Nation Under Therapy. ISBN 978-0-312-30444-7.
• 2009 The Science on Women in Science. ISBN 978-0-8447-4281-6.
• 2013 Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today (Values and Capitalism). ISBN 978-0-844-77262-2.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Christina Hoff Sommers

• Christina Hoff Sommers page at the American Enterprise Institute.
• Christina Hoff Sommers on Twitter
• MediaTransparency entry on Christina Hoff Sommers.
• Is the future of feminism conservative? – a discussion of Sommers in the Harvard Law Record
• Appearances on C-SPAN